Anatole Broyard famous quotes

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Waiting #Forever #Literature

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Portraits #Bookcases

If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Book #Three #Should

Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Writing #Want

There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Relationship #Children #Obedience

A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Book #Sunset #Cities

The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Self #Yes And No #Debate

Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Government #Aristocracy #Might

In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness…It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.
-- Anatole Broyard

#People #Different #Want

Chic is a convent for unloved women.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Chic #Unloved

I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Daughter #Father #Book

The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Book #Missing #Moments

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
-- Anatole Broyard

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Writing #Play #People

There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Art #Real #Play

There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Inappropriate

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Rome #Cities

A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Progress #Generations #Culture

An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Home #Aphorism #Particular

I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Hero #Character #Three

A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Book #Parent #Teeth

For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Sex #Women #Years

The more I like a book, the more reluctant I am to turn the page. Lovers, even book lovers, tend to cling. No one-night stands or "reads" for them.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Book #Reading #Night

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Book #Reading #Talking

People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Jobs #Writing #Ideas

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
-- Anatole Broyard

#War #Winning #Tourists

Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Sex #Writing #Missing

When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Radiance #World #Frank

To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer's love for another writer is never quite free of malice. He may enjoy discussing your failures even more than you do. He probably sees you as tragic, like his characters - or unworthy of tragedy, which is worse.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Character #Men #Tragedy

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Teeth #Sticks #Aphorism

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Two #People #Making Love

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Epic #Stories #Being Human

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.
-- Anatole Broyard

#Punishment #Misunderstood #Possibility